Singapore jails two ethnic Chinese bloggers for politically incorrect speech

Gillian Wong:

A Singapore court Friday sentenced two ethnic Chinese to prison for posting racist remarks about ethnic Malays on the Internet, in what is considered a landmark case underscoring the government's attempts to crack down on racial intolerance and regulate online expression.

Animal shelter worker Benjamin Koh Song Huat, 27, was jailed for one month while Nicholas Lim Yew, an unemployed 25-year-old, was sentenced to a nominal prison term of one day and fined the maximum 5,000 Singapore dollars ($2,969) for racist comments against the minority Malay community.

"Racial and religious hostility feeds on itself," said Senior District Judge Richard Magnus in passing sentence.

"Young Singaporeans ... must realize that callous and reckless remarks on racial or religious subjects have the potential to cause social disorder, in whatever medium or forum they are expressed," he said.

Lim and Koh stood in the docks with their heads bowed as they pleaded guilty to charges of committing acts "which had seditious tendencies to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races and classes."

Lim had posted disparaging comments about Malays and Islam on an Internet forum for dog lovers in a discussion about whether taxis should refuse to carry uncaged pets out of consideration for Muslims, whose religion considers dogs unclean.

In his online journal, Koh had advocated desecrating Islam's holy site of Mecca.

In mitigation, Lim and Koh's lawyers said their clients were remorseful and had separately issued apologies. Their remarks have been removed.

About 80 percent of Singapore's 4.2 million people are ethnic Chinese. Malays — mostly Muslims — make up 15 percent while the rest are ethnic Indians, Eurasians and others.

This small island republic is an oasis of calm in a region where ethnic tensions sometimes explode into violence, particularly in Indonesia. Singapore hasn't had traumatic racial experiences since deadly Chinese-Malay riots in the 1960s.

The two cases represented the first time Singaporeans had been prosecuted and convicted for racist expression under the Sedition Act — a colonial-era law used by the British to fight a communist insurgency — since the city-state's independence in 1965, the judge added.

It was necessary for the court "to make it clear that such an offense will be met, upon conviction, with a sentence of general deterrence," he said, and warned: "Bloggers who still have similar offending remarks are well advised to remove them immediately.

Koh and Lim could have been jailed up to three years.

Freedom of speech once again becomes a victim of political correctness.